{"id":481150,"date":"2026-10-01T03:02:13","date_gmt":"2026-10-01T03:02:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/481150\/"},"modified":"2026-10-01T03:02:13","modified_gmt":"2026-10-01T03:02:13","slug":"musician-and-composer-has-deep-roots-in-san-diego-underground-scene","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/481150\/","title":{"rendered":"Musician and composer has deep roots in San Diego underground scene"},"content":{"rendered":"

Preston\u00a0Swirnoff\u00a0is\u00a0a\u00a0musician, composer and sound artist\u00a0<\/a>who\u2019s released over 30 albums with numerous bands, collaborators and as solo projects. <\/p>\n

He\u2019s recently been commissioned to compose work for the\u00a0Plein Soleil festival in Corsica, the Singapore Biennale and the Scent Art Festival in Riga, Latvia. His sound art and compositions have been exhibited at Tate Modern, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art,\u00a0MACBA in\u00a0Barcelona, MOMA PS1 in New York City,\u00a0Niter\u00f3i\u00a0Contemporary Art Museum in\u00a0Rio de Janeiro, and elsewhere throughout the globe.<\/p>\n

Though he\u2019s toured and performed extensively throughout Europe, Asia and South America, for the past 35 years he\u2019s made San Diego his home. During the 1990s, he was a fixture in San Diego\u2019s vibrant punk scene, and since, his music has spanned contemporary classical, art rock, experimental, Brazilian folk, jazz\u00a0and sound art.<\/p>\n

I sat down with Preston in his Mission Hills home to discuss his music.<\/p>\n

You have a\u00a0new\u00a0piano record coming out in 2027.\u00a0What\u2019s\u00a0it\u00a0sound like?<\/p>\n

I\u2019m working in the tradition of repetition, minimalism and rhythmic playing,\u00a0but also weaving in some minor chord romantic\/classical melody within it. So instead of this upbeat major key Terry Riley thing, who I love, don\u2019t get me wrong, I injected something that was a little darker and closer to my roots\u2014Shostakovich, Stravinsky, Scriabin and the Russian pianists.\u00a0But then appropriating that for a more avant-garde style of piano.<\/p>\n

Many musicians have a particular genre they\u2019re\u00a0known\u00a0for, but your music is so diverse. What accounts for that?<\/p>\n

It always felt really natural to me that if you\u2019re a musician or\u00a0an\u00a0artist you would have a palette that\u2019s broad because you would want to explore the different areas of your craft. I\u00a0think\u00a0it\u2019s\u00a0weirder to stay in one lane because your curiosity guides\u00a0you as you age. We go through phases in life and we get into different things, and I trusted myself to know where the best direction would be and didn\u2019t really overthink it too much.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a>Preston\u00a0Swirnoff in Balboa Park. (Photo by Paul Georgeades)<\/p>\n

You\u2019re noted for site-specific compositions, and you did a piece for the Silo Room in Barrio Logan. Tell me more about that.<\/p>\n

Bread\u00a0&\u00a0Salt used to be a bread factory about a hundred years ago. And as soon as I saw these huge,\u00a0fifty-foot-tall grain silos that have this really long reverb, and the strange shape of the room they\u00a0were in\u2014it\u2019s a little bit claustrophobic\u2014I knew it would have really interesting acoustics to work with for singing with no amplification.\u00a0Just the natural reverb would be enough. <\/p>\n

I\u00a0was at that\u00a0show.\u00a0You played organ and the singers moved throughout the\u00a0room.<\/p>\n

Yes, I\u2019m always looking to break out of the traditional concert venue model. It\u2019s visually and acoustically very interesting to have them move around during the performance. In\u00a0sets of two,\u00a0I had them\u00a0singing\u00a0directly\u00a0into\u00a0the\u00a0silo tanks and then slowly walk out through the audience. I was using the space itself in the composition like another instrument.\u00a0And the\u00a0organ\u00a0mixed\u00a0really well with the voices because of the acoustics in the room. I found this churchy quality of the organ with the voices that was really evocative for me.<\/p>\n

Did you use a local choir?<\/p>\n

Yeah, that made it special and more of a community-based thing, which I really like doing. They\u2019re called the San Diego New Verbal Workshop.\u00a0They\u2019re a collection of local musicians and singers who perform experimental and avant-garde music.\u00a0I gave them the score and they rehearsed at USD (University of San Diego).\u00a0My piece was unconventional in the way it uses duration, extended tones and plays with harmony in ways that a conventional choir would find challenging, but I knew they would totally get it.<\/p>\n

How has San Diego influenced your music?<\/p>\n

It\u2019s\u00a0been totally formative because the first bands I was in were in Mission Beach, where I played in punk bands as a teenager and in my early 20s. The wild freedom of skateboarding,\u00a0surfing,\u00a0punk and youth culture in California was a huge influence on me.\u00a0It was that DIY\u00a0culture where everyone had their own label and zine.\u00a0That\u2019s the ethos\u00a0and\u00a0undercurrent still in everything I do. I learned about music\u00a0from\u00a0watching all these incredible\u00a0San Diego\u00a0bands in the \u201990s like Drive Like Jehu, Tanner, Fishwife, No Knife and Boilermaker.\u00a0Everyone knows these bands if they\u2019re into underground music because\u00a0San Diego was such a hub. I got so lucky to spend my 20s going to the Casbah, the Che Caf\u00e9, and the World Beat Center seeing all these homegrown bands that were so original. They didn\u2019t sound like anyone else\u2014we had our own sound.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Preston\u00a0Swirnoff\u00a0is\u00a0a\u00a0musician, composer and sound artist\u00a0who\u2019s released over 30 albums with numerous bands, collaborators and as solo projects. He\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":481151,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[13244,330,74,76,75],"class_list":["post-481150","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-diego","tag-mission-hills","tag-music","tag-san-diego","tag-san-diego-headlines","tag-san-diego-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/481150","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=481150"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/481150\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/481151"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=481150"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=481150"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=481150"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}